Baseball Toaster was unplugged on February 4, 2009.
scott@scottlongonline.com
* PitchFX is changing things so fundamentally that I'm not sure we have any comprehension just how much. Was color TV considered a gimmick when it first came in?
* I've finally cracked the video thing. No, my big egg-shaped head isn't different, but the problem isn't me ... well, it is, but you know what I mean. The problem is that most people surf at work, meaning video is both a bandwidth and an attention problem. What's needed is closed-captioning -- the video could run, but you could read along. Of course, if all you get is a talking head that's muted and reading along, that's not compelling. I need to figure out how to get more stuff -- diagrams, anatomical drawings -- into the act. Ideally, I could show the injury happen itself, but that's still a rights issue. So, if you want to start a business, vlog captioning is my idea. If it's already out there, let me know.
* A Ken Griffey Jr deal back to the Mariners will probably end up being the last deal of the Bavasi Era in Seattle. I have a piece that's been in limbo regarding the "Top Ten GM Candidates" that I need to finish.
* If Ben Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie) and Colin Meloy (The Decemberists) sang together, would the world end? I think it would just be very depressing, if brilliant.
* American Idol has jumped the shark. If they were smart -- and they are -- they'd take about five years off and let the talent "build" out there. An interim step would be some kind of "celebrity" AI. Take a group of already signed, but neglected talent jump in. Add in some people looking for respect or a second chance - I'm thinking Ashlee Simpson here - and you have something interesting. Even a seeming "ringer" like Mariah Carey or Christina Aguilera might have trouble with the wrong theme.
* Jay Bruce is leading the International League in nearly every hitting category of note and Dusty Baker is inserting Corey Patterson as his leadoff man. I don't have anything past that. "We hold these truths to be self-evident."
* More fun with Minor League stats:
*Mike Hessman has 17 HR. SEVENTEEN!
*Brian Mazone has four wins for a team that doesn't have ten wins.
*How is Luke Hughes not better right now than Nick Punto?
*Bobby Brownlie is making something of a comeback in the Nats organization and was just bumped up to Triple-A. *Mat Gamel and Matt LaPorta both have OPS over 1000 in Double-A, but will have to convince the baseball world that defense really doesn't matter. With Ryan Braun in LF and one of these two in RF, I'm not sure having Dwayne Murphy would help. The Brewers would have to have nothing but K/GB pitchers to make it work. Hmm.
*Ever root for a guy just because of his name? I'd love to hear several announcers deal with Chris Jakubauskus. Heck, I'd like to hear the Raniers great Mike Curto do it.
*Same thing with Kila Kaaihue.
*It used to be you could tell when someone really knew prospects by whether they knew how to pronounce "Nageotte" (Nazh-ette). Then it was "Komine" (Ko-min-ay). Who is it now?
* Is there a better site out there now than Ballbug? No, there is not. Even better, it's the epitome of "Bissinger's Dilemma" - content is content and good blogs are right there aside good newspapers or "pro" web sites like BP and MLB.com. The next step will be disintermediation of comments, which will be a big deal because of ad revenue. After that, I think there's going to be a much bigger disintermediation, but I'll wait until I've figured out the profit angle on that before talking about it.
One of the more amusing aspects of the breakup of the Soviet Union was the sudden influx of Eastern Bloc players onto the pro tennis circuit and the resultant struggles of sportscasters to pronounce names they'd never run across before.
Oh, you meant of injuries. never mind.
Text is more easily scanned, searched, re-viewed, and accessed privately. If video is going to pull off a Clayton Christensen-style revolution, it won't be by providing the exact same thing that text/photos do, only worse. It'll be by starting off doing something that it's not worth the effort for text to go.
Perhaps part of your struggles with the medium may come from the fact that what video does best vs. text is convey emotions. But emotional arguments are antithetical to the Baseball Prospectus worldview, which makes it even harder for you to exploit the medium.
Ken ... text isn't superior, text is ingrained, entrenched. My struggles with the medium are physical (big round head) and rights-based (can't show the video because I don't have billions of dollars.) I can SHOW you how Drew got injured so much more easily than I can describe it.
If I'm a fantasy player, for example, I probably don't really care how Drew got hurt. He's not on my fantasy team. All I want to do is scan your column for MY players and see how long they're gonna be out. Text is far superior for that purpose than video. I'm only interested in 5% of your content. If your content is on video instead of text, I have to subject myself to 95% of the content I don't care about in order to get to the 5% I do want.
Showing how Drew got hurt is a great use of video. But I shouldn't have to hear about how Furcal's back is doing and when ARod's going to return in the same video. Video will succeed when it is used in a way that makes the consumer more effective and efficient, not the producer.
It's how the video is used that matters. Render unto video that which must be video, but leave as text anything that works well as text.
I don't need to see Will's head reading something. Will can't read out loud faster than I can read text in my own head. He's not helping me use my time more efficiently by doing that. He's slowing me down.
Complement the text with video that can only be presented as video to get the message across.
I won't argue that it could use some changes, but they wouldn't necessarily improve anything.
Finally, closed captioning would be an awful idea, and jamming the screen with filler wouldn't be much better. Sometimes, there's no need to reinvent the wheel.
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